Not only are women underrepresented at scientific meetings, they participate less than men in question-and-answer sessions, self-limiting their involvement and participation. But a public discussion of the problem helps.
World leaders who gather in Osaka, Japan, for the G20 summit this week will begin a conversation on worldwide data governance—and though they are deeply divided on the question of who should control data, some nations could seek to devise a system that excludes China.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is hosting this year’s summit, says he sees data governance as a priority. Indeed, the fact that the internet has remained relatively global and open has enabled the growth of the digital economy. App stores on our phones, email accessible around the world, overnight shipping on our favorite goods, the sharing of news and medical research and stock information—they’re all part of this global connectivity. Underneath it lie data, 1s and 0s that form everything from bank ledgers to social-media posts. Exchanges of data between organizations (companies, universities, governments, etc.) across borders are what contribute to companies offering services around the world in near real time, or to allied countries sharing law enforcement and intelligence information.
At issue is how countries view data. Do companies own the information? Does an individual own it? Does a government have access to it? The problem is that governments across China, India, the European Union, Japan, and the United States have philosophical differences on how they view these issues.
In its 2014 decision, the CAFC did not decide that Google’s use of the Java API declarations in Android necessarily infringed. Because Google had raised a fair use defense to Oracle’s claim of infringement, the CAFC sent the case back to the lower court for a trial on that defense.
After a two-week jury trial in 2016, Google’s fair use defense prevailed. However, Oracle once again appealed to the [Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit], arguing that no reasonable jury could have found Google’s use of the Java declarations to be fair and non-infringing. The CAFC agreed and remanded the case to the lower court to consider Oracle’s damage claims.
To forestall a damages trial, Google has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review both the CAFC’s copyrightability and fair use rulings. This is not its first such request. Google previously sought Supreme Court review of the CAFC’s copyrightability ruling, but the Court decided against hearing this appeal, perhaps because the fair use issue had yet to be considered.
Select Apple Stores now sell One Drop, a blood glucose monitor that closely integrates with the iPhone and the Apple Watch.
It’s the only diabetes product that Apple is selling in its physical stores, although Apple previously carried One Drop online.
Apple is increasingly breaking into the health space by selling consumer-oriented products and integrating the data from them in its Health app, making the iPhone and Apple Watch hubs for people’s personal health.
Three men dressed for business travel in jeans and dress shirts loaded backpacks into the trunk of a black coupe and wound their way through the center of a major European city. When they arrived at their hotel, they unloaded their luggage and waited giddily to pass through the revolving doors. They were checking into the hotel to hack it.
Hackers target financial institutions because that’s where the money is, and they target retail chains because that’s where people spend the money. Hotels might be a less obvious target, but they’re hacked almost as often because of the valuable data that passes through them, like credit cards and trade secrets. Thieves have targeted electronic door locks to burgle rooms and used malware attacks to log credit card swipes in real time. They’ve even used Wi-Fi to hijack hotels’ internal networks in search of corporate data. Just about all of the industry’s major players have reported breaches, including Hilton Worldwide Holdings, InterContinental Hotels Group, and Hyatt Hotels.
The Treasury Department late Friday proposed rules for a tax on the endowments of private colleges and universities, but higher-education experts say the guidelines raise questions more than they provide answers.
A provision in the sweeping 2017 tax law imposes a 1.4 percent excise tax on investment income at private schools with at least 500 tuition-paying students and endowments worth at least $500,000 per student. The Internal Revenue Service anticipates that about 25 to 40 institutions will be affected.
“Each college and university across the country is uniquely organized, and the proposed regulation is likely to have disparate impacts,” said Liz Clark, vice president of policy and research at the National Association of College and University Business Officers, a trade group.
In the heart of the neighborhood where Amazon has made its home, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said Monday that she was interested in talking about a “different HQ2,” as she welcomed Apple and that tech giant’s plans for a significant expansion in the city.
Expanding upon an earlier promise to grow to 1,000 employees in Seattle, Apple and Durkan said that the plan is to now reach 2,000 over the next five years. The first 200 new employees will be hired by the end of the year, Apple vice president of global real estate Kristina Raspe said Monday at an event at the new Seattle campus.
“We have room to grow and we are thriving,” Durkan said at a news conference at 333 Dexter, a large new South Lake Union office complex that is currently under construction.
If every public high school in Virginia offered college admission tests free, the supply of graduating seniors who could compete for entry to major universities within the state would grow significantly, according to a study released Tuesday.
The pool of prospects for the highly selective University of Virginia and College of William & Mary would expand nearly 20 percent, the study from U-Va. researchers found, and as much as 40 percent for broader-access public universities. The boost would be especially notable, the study found, for students from poor families who otherwise might not think about signing up to take the SAT or ACT.
But universal testing has been slow to catch on in Virginia even though many states and school systems elsewhere pay to provide one of the two major admission tests during the school day.
The Israeli government is developing a national strategy to make the country a leader in artificial intelligence (AI), and according to one researcher involved in drawing up the plan, the starting point could hardly be better.
“There’s not much that needs to be done, in fact; the government has to send a signal, that’s all,” said Isaac Ben-Israel, a former Israeli defence force major general who, among many other titles, is head of the Security Studies programme in Tel Aviv University.
“There is in fact a lot of money already invested in AI research here by global companies. Nobody waits for the government to do something. It happens automatically,” Ben-Israel told Science|Business.
After investigating the nature of a mysterious and apparently cigar-shaped object called ‘Oumuamua spotted in 2017 speeding through our solar system, astronomers remain uncertain over how to classify it, but are confident it is not an alien spaceship.
The problem is that all the fundamental infrastructure was built with this kind of trust and openness in mind. And it’s really hard, once you have this infrastructure and it gets in place to a large extent all across the world, to change it easily. And that’s, I think, one of the major issues because now we’ve let everyone in. And people discovered that they can steal. They can steal data, they can steal privacy, they can modify documents, you can spoof identities, you either hide your true identity or take on someone else’s. We can produce fake news.
And let me keep going. The other thing is that Google, Facebook, and others—when they started, they didn’t have a clear business model in mind. And they discovered advertising, which by itself is not a bad thing. But they discovered that advertisers said, not unreasonably, the more we know about people, the more we can provide information that’s relevant to their interests and needs, et cetera. But that has now carried on to an obscene level. And we, as individuals, no longer have any control over information about ourselves.
Evan Selinger: You recently said something that’s very interesting about how things have changed during the transition from your last book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, to the new one, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. “The problem is that nobody cares whether or not tech is making us smarter. What they care about is whether tech is making us better — morally better.” Where is this discussion happening?
Clive Thompson: When I’m giving talks now, people are always asking ethical questions about our comportment towards one another. For example, how is social networking impacting behavior? Folks don’t want to talk about issues like intelligence and cognition. They just really want to know if digital technology is creating a generation of assholes.
The Center for Scientific Review (CSR), National Institute of Health are working to improve awareness of the NIH policy (NOT-OD-17-050) that encourages citation of preprints in grant applications and reports.
In response to feedback submitted by ASAPbio on May 30, Kristin Kramer, Ph.D., at the Office of Communications for the CSR, stated (June 11, 2019):
“We appreciate that you’ve taken the time to share your concerns with us. We are fully aware that preprints are allowable material and can be cited in a proposal in any place one would typically site references (biosketch, progress report, etc.). In response to concerns about preprints being routinely ignored by reviewers, this review cycle we have emphasized the preprint policy in our ‘all hands’ meeting with scientific review officers. SROs have been asked to reiterate NIH’s preprint policy in pre-meeting teleconferences with reviewers and again at the time of review meetings. We agree that this is an important issue and SROs are emphasizing the policy that preprints are allowed not only to ensure that the review process is fair and consistent across study sections, but also so that reviewers (who are frequently PIs submitting proposals themselves) are aware and can take advantage of this policy and include citations to preprints in their own grant submissions.”
Princeton University, Center for Information Technology Policy.
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Salganik, whose appointment starts July 1, succeeds Edward Felten, the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs, who served as the center’s founding director. CITP was established in 2005 as a collaborative initiative between the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs to investigate and educate about the role of digital technologies as they interact with society.
“This school provides early career researchers (at MSc-level to 3 years after their PhD) from the Latin American Region with the necessary set of foundational data science skills to enable them to analyse their data in an efficient and effective manner for the 21st century.”
“Participation in this study involves taking a survey that asks basic demographic information as well as what courses you teach, whether or not you believe you are prepared to teach computing, what your support system is, and other similar questions. The survey takes approximately 20-30 minutes with some optional questions to help us understand the impact of professional development (PD) and your PD needs.”
“Metis, a leading provider of data science skills training for individuals and businesses, is announcing its Advancing Women in Data Science Scholarship, which will award four full-tuition scholarships to women applying to its September bootcamps in Chicago and Seattle (two at each campus).” Deadline to apply is July 29.
Google announced the beta availability of Deep Learning Containers, a new cloud service that provides environments for developing, testing as well as for deploying machine learning applications. In March this year, Amazon also launched a similar offering, AWS Deep Learning Containers with Docker image support for easy deployment of custom machine learning (ML) environments.
On 10 April, astrophysicists announced that they had captured the first ever image of a black hole. This was exhilarating news, but none of the giddy headlines mentioned that the image would have been impossible without open-source software. The image was created using Matplotlib, a Python library for graphing data, as well as other components of the open-source Python ecosystem. Just five days later, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) rejected a grant proposal to support that ecosystem, saying that the software lacked sufficient impact.
It’s a familiar problem: open-source software is widely acknowledged as crucially important in science, yet it is funded non-sustainably. Support work is often handled ad hoc by overworked graduate students and postdocs, and can lead to burnout. “It’s sort of the difference between having insurance and having a GoFundMe when their grandma goes to the hospital,” says Anne Carpenter, a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose lab developed the image-analysis tool CellProfiler. “It’s just not a nice way to live.”
Scientists writing open-source software often lack formal training in software engineering, which means that they might never have learnt best practices for code documentation and testing. But poorly maintained software can waste time and effort, and hinder reproducibility.
1. You need ~3000 subjects for 80% power to detect a 10pp interaction effect.
2. With 500 subjects, the 95% CIs around the interaction term average ~35pp wide.
